A delightful story has been making the rounds from England that man-finding app Grindr ground to a halt when Olympic competitors arrived in London. People UK breathlessly noted, "technicians believe the arrival of Olympic teams on Monday sparked a flood of new customers – and loss of the service in East London," and quoted an unnamed Londoner saying that "the Grindr system obviously couldn’t cope." It looked too good to be true, and, sadly, it was. A Grindr press person told us:
"While we'd love to believe that the best-built men in the world all dressed up in Lycra and congregating in one place can generate a huge increase in Grindr traffic, we can say with confidence that the arrival of the Olympic teams had little or no effect on our server. The truth is that there are many factors that cause a technological service disruption."
The spokesperson refused to elaborate on which factors actually did take Grindr down earlier this week, though. Hrm.
Grindr has become incredibly popular — boasting over four million users as of mid-June — and it wouldn't be the first social network to have problems scaling. Grindr is releasing a new app later this summer, with improved search and other features. For now, though, users can take comfort in the fact that service returned a few days ago. As CEO Joel Simkhai put it in a blog post, "I know it was frustrating. I was frustrated myself."